No theater in the world may be accomplishing so much through the efforts of so few. With a full-time staff that would barely fill a shift at a medium-size Starbucks, Druid Theatre Company, based in Galway, on the rugged west coast of Ireland, has evolved into a staging ground for Irish playwriting with global reach, an outcome that has conferred on it the unlikely status of world-class institution.
The theater’s international reputation began accelerating in the 1990s with its celebrated collaboration with the young Anglo-Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh, and the breakout success of its production of his seminal, warped tragicomedy, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” After arriving on these shores, Druid’s production earned four 1998 Tony Awards, including one for its director, the company’s artistic leader, Garry Hynes. Druid followed up with more of McDonagh’s black comedies, and eventually made another major splash by turning to the Irish theatrical past, in a project it called “DruidSynge”: The company took on six works by the classic comic playwright John Millington Synge, and brought some of them in 2008 to the Kennedy Center, where Hynes had previously directed “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
(Robert Day) - Garry Hynes on the island of Inis Mea in June 2011.
And now, in yet another of its outsize statements, the troupe — so small and unorthodox it doesn’t even offer a traditional full season of productions — has assigned itself the task of letting American audiences in on one of Ireland’s best-kept theater secrets. That would be the career of 77-year-old Tom Murphy, regarded by many in the know as, along with Brian Friel, the country’s greatest living playwright.
He’s certainly the greatest living Irish playwright with virtually no profile in the United States, a condition that Hynes and the Kennedy Center hope to help rectify with “DruidMurphy,” which like “DruidSynge” ties together multiple works in an effort to consider the breadth of a dramatist’s impact. In Murphy’s case, Druid has chosen three full-length plays — “A Whistle in the Dark,” “Conversations on a Homecoming” and “Famine” — that are unified in touching on the nation’s enduring experience with emigration. The week of performances beginWednesday in the Eisenhower Theater with “Conversations on a Homecoming,” and culminates on Oct. 20 with a marathon presentation of all three plays.
Hynes, a co-founder of Druid way back in 1975, has a long history with Murphy, a native of Tuam (pronounced like something close to “Tomb”) in County Galway. He was a writer associated with Druid for a few years in the 1980s, and the two developed a close working relationship. That it has progressed to the point at which the company has become an ambassador for his canon is a matter of deep meaning to the playwright, who relishes this ambitious embrace of his dramas.
“It has meant almost more than words can say,” Murphy observes by phone from Dublin, where he lives. “To have my work revisited by this phenomenally successful company has been wonderful.”
The reception for “DruidMurphy,” which this summer started in Britain as part of the London 2012 Festival, and went on to New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, has been largely enthusiastic: “I emerged astonished both by Murphy’s historical awareness and Druid’s ensemble vigor,” wrote Michael Billington in London’s Guardian. This week, Washington audiences will have their turn immersing themselves in Murphy’s explorations of the less-forgiving aspects of the Irish character.
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